Solidarity Lead Articles

Long view of Clarion Alley with various murals by CAMP. Photo by Dawn Starin.SOME WALLS KEEP us out. Some walls keep us apart. Not these walls. Clarion Alley's walls of art invite us in. Creating a dialogue, they shout in both full glorious Technicolor and in stark shades of black and white,"Come in and look at our history, read our words, come in and appreciate what we must always remember, what we have lost, what we have found, what we must stand for and what we must treasure."....

Raoul Peck, the Haitian-born director of Lumumba (2000) and I Am Not Your Negro (2016), has a new film. The Young Karl Marx, a period drama, recounts the life of the founder of communism between his exile from Germany in 1843 and the publication of The Communist Manifesto on the eve of the revolutions of 1848.Justly described as a bromance by some reviewers, the film’s central story-line is the blossoming friendship of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. But Peck doesn’t overly romanticize...

Since the Umbrella Movement and the ascent of Xi Jinping to presidency, the Chinese government has pursued a heightened policy of repression toward Hong Kong in levels never before seen. The newest attack on the Hong Kong people’s basic human rights and political freedom came earlier this year in January, when the city’s election committee officially stripped social progressive party Demosisto’s candidate Agnes Chow of her right to run in the 2018 Legislative Council (LegCo) election....

Even as many mainstream liberals and feminists recently celebrated the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, which solidified the legal right to abortion - for those who can afford it - economic inequality continues to limit abortion access. Being unable to access wanted abortion deepens poverty and vulnerability to other forms of social suffering.Economics of abortion access (Third Wave Foundation)

Democrat Doug Jones’ narrow victory over the Trumpist Republican and accused pedophile Roy Moore in Alabama’s special Senatorial election caused a nationwide sigh of relief for leftists, liberals and some moderate Republicans “at least Alabama did not vote an accused pedophile into office.”Doug Jones celebrates victory. AP Photo/John BazemoreExit polls made one fact clear -- Roy Moore’s loss was due in large part to the huge turnout of Black voters, especially Black women. Thirty...

DEAR FRIENDS:By now you have surely heard about the catastrophic impact of Hurricane María in Puerto Rico, as well as the slow and still inadequate response by U.S. federal agencies, such as FEMA.A month after María, dozens of communities are still inaccessible by car or truck. Close to 90 percent of all homes lack electricity. Half lack running water. Many of Puerto Rico’s 3.2 million residents have difficulties obtaining drinking water. The death toll continues to rise due to lack of...

The US Left has long struggled with the problem of doing electoral politics in a “winner-take-all” voting system and has long debated how to relate to the Democratic Party and especially to the campaigns of progressive Democratic Party candidates.This strategic question is especially pressing in states, like New York, that allow “fusion” balloting. In New York State, individual candidates may be endorsed by and run as the candidate of more than one party.The Working Families Party...

Crises raise new, sharp problems that unveil and accentuate both the admirable and the negative aspects of the societies they affect. They also pose new tasks and offer new perspectives on already established plans. The case of Puerto Rico and the effect and response to the strike by Hurricane María is no exception.We begin with the admirable: the presence of solidarity, of community, and of generosity that continues to exist in our country in spite of three decades of neoliberal practices and...

On 20 September 2017, the Civil Guard and the Spanish National Police arrested 14 senior officials of the Generalitat (the Catalan government) and carried out 40 searches of public buildings and private homes. A police operation then seized propaganda material of the CUP (Candidatura de Unidad Popular, the main party of the pro-independence left) and, without any legal authorisation, surrounded its headquarters for the whole day, for no reason other than provocation. Following the prosecution of...

The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program was established by an executive order from President Obama in June 2012. Far from a gift from a sympathetic administration, DACA was a victory won only through the brave and militant actions of undocumented activists who were willing to criticize the devastating immigration policies of a supposedly progressive President, including by occupying Obama campaign offices.Tuesday morning, a new administration that nobody could mistake as...

Torrential monsoon rains in Bangladesh, India, and Nepal have already taken 1200 lives, and left millions homeless and internally displaced in South Asia. A third of Bangladesh is under water; Hurricane Harvey has slammed the Texas and Louisiana Gulf Coasts, where it has continued to rain, resulting in the worst flooding in Texas history and the worst rainstorm in U.S. history. Much of Houston, the United States’ fourth largest city, is still flooded.What is happening in Houston, like what...

We express our deepest sympathy and solidarity with the brave protestors--including comrades in the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), and International Socialist Organization (ISO)--who fell victim to an act of white supremacist terror in Charlottesville, VA this weekend. We are heartbroken and angry to learn of the murder of Heather Heyer, and more determined than ever to continue fighting.While President Trump equivocates with statements about...

In the face of the political crisis in Venezuela, as anti-capitalists, we declare that:1) We reject the offensive by the opposition against the Bolivarian government. The Venezuelan opposition is led by profoundly antidemocratic sectors, tied to the dominant class. These sectors are preparing an authoritarian reaction against the gains of the Bolivarian revolution, even if some of these gains have been watered down by the crisis in the country. The opposition has not hesitated in resorting to...

As nativist right-wing populism surges across the Global North amidst the exhaustion of social democracy and “Third Way” liberalism, the United States finds itself at the forefront. Elsewhere, right populist parties have led in the polls, as with the Front National in France and the PVV in the Netherlands, or played key roles in seismic political events, as with UKIP and Brexit. But so far, only in the US has the right populist wave captured a major political party and ridden it to power....

On a fateful Thursday, June 1, Donald Trump announced that “The United States will withdraw from the Paris climate accord,” setting off alarm bells and outraged protests in U.S. cities and around the world. We would suggest that under present circumstances, he chose the better – well, less bad -- of the existing options.Photo: Francois Mori/APTo be absolutely clear, we are not adopting a stance of “the worse the better.” Not at all. What socialists and all environmentalists actually...

Just six days after the election, a 24-story council high-rise went up in flames. Grenfell Tower housed 600 mostly poor tenants, many of whom were people of color.The outside cladding that had recently been installed by a string of private (corner-cutting) contractors was not fireproof and became the conduit that turned the entire building into an inferno within 30 minutes.Located in Kensington, one of the richest boroughs in Britain, the poor neighborhood in its midst instantly became the...

Portland, Oregon became national news, following the May 26 murders on the MAX (the city’s light rail system). The killer, Jeremy Christian, slashed the necks of three white men (one survived) who tried to end his threatening tirade against two black teenage girls, one wearing a hijab.

Solidarity activists are raising their voices against the assassination on May 10 of Miriam Elizabeth Rodríguez Martínez, a human rights activist in the northern Mexican state of Tamaulipas well known for holding the authorities to account after the murder of her daughter.Miriam Elizabeth Rodríguez MartínezThe following open letter calls on state and federal authorities in Mexico and the U.S. government to ensure the safety of those who stand for human rights.OPEN LETTEROn the night of...

As Trump took office, the majority of Americans were anxious, worried.Trump’s inaugural address did nothing to put their minds at ease. Many were shocked and frightened by his short, strident speech with its allusion to “American carnage” and its dystopian visions of an American populated by “mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation; an education system flush with cash, but which leaves...

Last night, supposedly in response to the use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime, President Trump ordered a missile attack on a Syrian air base, the first U.S. military strike directly against the regime (though hardly the first U.S. intervention in the war). As socialists and internationalists, we oppose both imperialist intervention and the atrocities of the Syrian government.Imperialism creates problems that it cannot solve, and absolves itself of responsibility for the consequences....

After the dramatic increase in fuel, electricity, and water prices throughout the country and a month of uninterrupted, massive protests across the country that have deepened the crisis of legitimacy--which is increasingly a political crisis--of Mexico’s oligarchic regime, we are now beginning to see the first steps of the new, extreme right, xenophobic, macho, racist, and anti-Mexican administration in the White House. This can only bring further complications, contradictions, and...

On Inauguration Day, we note the considerable range of the opposition to Trump, from traditional activists to very mainstream folks. In many respects the opposition mounted was unprecedented, on a day where patriotic and jingoistic hyperbole is typically concentrated and loudly broadcast more than at any other time, and when, traditionally, new Presidents make appeals to the heart and to democratic unity while all who know how false the claims are bite their lips, party, and hope for the best....

I came back from the Women’s March in D.C. exhausted but thrilled, convinced that we are seeing the birth of a new women’s movement. The size, the inclusiveness, the defiant but good-humored spirit, and the progressive politics all make me very optimistic, though there will be challenges.Photo by Nancy Holmstrom.Let’s start with the size: having gone to demonstrations in D.C. since I was in high school, more than fifty years ago, including the 1963 March for Jobs and Freedom, numerous...

¡Erwin Baur, presente!Erwin receiving recognition at the 2006 Labor Notes conference.Erwin--an autoworker, a Solidarity member, and a lifelong revolutionary--passed on November 30 at the age of 101. He had been involved in socialist politics since 1934, when he co-founded a socialist club at his high school, and he became a founding member of the Socialist Workers Party in 1938. Erwin is survived by his wife Estar and daughter Sonia.In this interview from Against the Current, Erwin speaks...

Like millions of people here and around the world, we woke up this morning dismayed and frightened that Donald Trump has been elected President. Whatever we each thought of the Democratic Party and of Hillary Clinton, none of us wanted to believe that so many people could bring themselves to vote for Trump.Exit poll data by race and gender.Simply put: there is a vacuum on the left of US politics. No serious analysis could conclude that the presidential wing of the Democratic Party represents...

As the October 11th strike approached, Chicago teachers set up a strike headquarters and distributed picket signs while parents and their children picketed the mayor’s house. After 18 months of bargaining, and over a year since their contract expired, the Board of Education blinked just before the deadline and came up with a significantly better contract offer that is now being debated within the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU). Both the earlier January 2016 Board of Education proposal and the...

In a surreal and bitterly polarized election year, there is one issue on which the majority of voters, left to right, agree: Flush the Trans Pacific Partnership. Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders ran against the TPP, and Hillary Clinton says she opposes it after she used to support it.There is also one issue on which the established leadership of the Republican and Democratic parties, amidst all the infamous gridlock of Congress, agree: they want the TPP. And it’s just possible that in the...

On the steamy evening of July 27 in Philadelphia a raucous audience of close to 800 gathered to discuss electoral politics and movement-building. This was day three of Socialist Convergence, organized by a coalition of left organizations to create a socialist presence during the Democratic National Convention. Our target participants were the Sanders delegates and supporters who had promised to challenge the party’s lack of democracy and to organize protests in and around the convention that...

A year after marriage equality was legalized nationwide, and two months since the June 12 massacre at a gay club in Orlando, the LGBT movement confronts a contradictory future. Although Orlando dramatized that violence against LGBT people persists, fueled by rightwing politicians’ hateful attacks, great victories have been won, and public acceptance of queer people has expanded to levels that once seemed unimaginable.But some of these victories have been constrained by the social structures...

If you believe that a better choice is possible, a movement for political revolution also needs an electoral expression. In this election, the best expression at the national level of what all of us have been fighting for is the Green Party campaign of Jill Stein. Solidarity supports that campaign as a way to support the political revolution in 2016.Looking not only toward November but also beyond, especially to Bernie Sanders’ supporters who reject the dead-end option of Hillary Clinton, we...

Last night, during a Black Lives Matter protest in Dallas called in response to the killings of Alton Sterling and Philandro Castile, one or more snipers shot at least a dozen police officers. As of now, five are dead, as is at least one suspect in the shooting. Before his death in a standoff with police, the suspect indicated that he was upset with police shootings and with Black Lives Matter, and that he wanted to kill white people. He said he was working alone, and has no connection to Black...

On June 27th, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a 2013 Texas law restricting abortion by requiring clinics to meet the standards of ambulatory surgical centers and that their doctors have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals. Although Texas argued that these laws had been passed “to protect women’s health,” five of the eight judges did not buy that transparently fraudulent story. Writing for the majority opinion, Justice Stephen Breyer wrote that “neither of these provisions offers...

The killings perpetrated at the Pulse lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, intersex and queer (LGBTIQ) nightclub in Orlando in the United States leave us in profound grief. Our thoughts are with the victims and their loved ones, predominantly from the Latino community, and all the victims of hate crimes against LGBTIQ people around the world. We are participating in and initiating solidarity rallies, in many countries grieving over the biggest concentrated slaughter of LGBTIQ people since the Second...

The Bernie Sanders campaign represented a breakthrough on the U.S. left--not because the insurgency within the Democratic Party offered a new opportunity to transform the graveyard of social movements, but primarily because the campaign surfaced a growing desire of millions for a left program and opened a much larger space to talk about socialism, while also exposing the limitation of the Democratic Party.Inside the July 25-28 Democratic National Convention (DNC), Sanders’ delegates will be...

Glenn Shelton, a retired president of Michigan Mailhandlers Local 307 who never stopped fighting for the rights of working people, and a member of Solidarity, died March 24 after a battle with cancer. He was preceded in death by his wife Rosemary Jackson-Shelton only weeks earlier. We mourn these losses.Glenn hoped to be remembered as someone who “loved his people, his family and his friends,” and as “the type of person who showed us that we can fight what is evil in the world without...

We all know that there’s something different about today’s working class. One obvious difference is that today’s working class produces fewer things “you can drop on your toe,” as The Economist famously put it, and more that you can’t. What’s actually changing in capitalist production in the United States?While Marx mostly spoke of industrial workers who extracted or made goods, he did not, in fact, define the proletariat by what commodities it produced. As he wrote in Capital,...

Nine years after the outbreak of the financial crisis that continues to produce damaging social effects through the austerity policies imposed on victim populations, it’s time to take another look at the commitments that were made at that time by bankers, financiers, politicians, and regulatory bodies. Those four players have failed fundamentally in the promises they made in the wake of the crisis: to moralise the banking system, separate commercial banks from investment banks, end exorbitant...

Surreptitiously--like bandits who prey on their victim--and undemocratically, the elite which owns finance and the multinationals is driving the implementation of new “Free Trade Agreements”: the Trans-Pacific Partnership, (TPP); the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP); and the Trade in Services Agreement (TSA).As on previous occasions--when the treaties that gave birth to the European Union or the North American Free Trade Agreement were imposed--the dominant classes...

The LCR-SAP condemns in the most energetic fashion the cowardly terrorist attacks that were perpetrated on 22 March in Brussels. No political or religious motivation can be an excuse for these heinous crimes. The LCR-SAP expresses its support and its profound solidarity with all the innocent victims of this blind violence.The LCR-SAP also calls for greater democratic vigilance in the face of the new warmongering, racist, and Islamophobic security drive that these terrible events are likely to...

On March 2nd the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in the case of Whole Women’s Health vs. Hellerstedt. The judges will be deciding the constitutionality of a 2013 Texas bill (HB2) that places restrictions on clinics where abortions are performed—most performed within the first eight weeks of pregnancy. Before the law was passed, Texas had 41 clinics where abortions were performed. When the law first went into effect half shut down.While the requirements were motivated by anti-abortion...

Bernie Sanders' campaign is sweeping like a meteor across the political sky. After a dead heat with Hillary Clinton in the Iowa caucuses and a smashing victory in New Hampshire, his challenge to the establishment is no longer discounted as an amusing sideshow in the world of so-called “real politics.” This is turning into an extraordinary election year in the midst of an extraordinary social crisis. The party establishments that control the Democratic and Republican parties on behalf of the...

The COP21 in Le Bourget Paris in December 2015 adopted an agreement on global warming and climate change, which was signed by all 195 participating countries... It is the first comprehensive agreement after 21 years of meetings and conferences conducted under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. The 1997 Kyoto Protocol applied to just a few countries and was sabotaged by the USA and others. Copenhagen in 2009 broke up in acrimony and emissions were allowed to let rip without any...

Just weeks ago, Flint’s lead-poisoned water was a local story as the state’s coverup of the disaster crumbled. Today it’s a national and international headline, and most people know the basics: how the state’s appointed “Emergency Manager” for Flint ordered the switchover from Detroit’s clean and safe water system to Flint River water. How anti-corrosive chemicals weren’t added to the heavily polluted and toxic river water, causing it to leach lead from aging pipes directly to...

Claudio Katz: In my opinion, the so-called progressive cycle of the last decade in South America has been a process resulting from partially successful popular rebellions (Argentina, Bolivia, Venezuela, Ecuador) that altered the relationship of forces in the region. They allowed us to take advantage of higher prices for raw materials and dollar income in a way that differed considerably from what prevailed in other periods. During this interval, neo-developmental and distributionist economic...

The catastrophe that Syria has become, and the unfathomable refugee crisis it has unleashed, is a stark mirror reflection of the real condition of a failed world system. We have stated in previous editorials that “imperialism creates problems that it cannot solve,” which in these circumstances is a major understatement. It has figuratively--and literally--planted bombs all over the Middle East and elsewhere, blowing whole societies apart, overwhelming neighboring countries and casting...

We fight dictatorships, imperialist aggression, and Daesh. We reject the politics of “national security,” racism, and austerity. It’s time to mobilise!Over recent months, people across the Middle East have been hit by an intensification of conflict in Syria and Iraq. That escalation has been sponsored both by global imperialist powers--chiefly the USA, Russia, and European countries--and regional imperialist actors including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, and Iran. These conflicts are the...

An enemy ideology is tunneling within U.S. society, intending to take over and establish its state and social supremacy. Most of the time it moves mainly undercover, but will seize any opportune moment to leap from the shadows and proclaim its aims openly. It is deeply hostile to democratic values, religious (and irreligious) freedom, women’s rights, and racial equality. It’s not something new in our country, but it’s capable of shifting forms and appearances as circumstances permit.The...

The horrible attacks which took place in Paris on Friday evening, killing 120 people and causing dozens of casualties, this blind violence provokes revolt and indignation. The NPA shares these feelings and expresses its solidarity with the victims, with their close relations. This tragedy is even worse in that it hit innocent victims, the murderous attacks were aimed at the population. This contemptible cruelty in central Paris responds to the equally blind and even more fatal violence of the...

Why are so many people attracted to Bernie Sanders’ campaign? The self-described socialist has won the support of millions. More than 100,000 people were excited enough to attend 3,500 meetings throughout 50 states on July 29. By the end of September he'd received donations from 650,000 people—including $25.5 million mostly in small donations in just three months. On the labor front, he held a conference call of 26,000 union members in September, with 1,350 of them volunteering to work on...

The earth's climate is changing quickly, much faster than experts thought. There is no doubt what is causing this: the warming of the atmosphere as a result of emissions by greenhouse gases, mainly CO2 from the burning of oil, coal, and natural gas. The Earth has warmed by 0.8°C degrees over the last two centuries. This is sufficient to cause a rise in sea levels by almost two metres in the centuries to come. Nobody can stop it. Hundreds of millions of people will be forced to move, millions of...

African-Americans have been murdered by white mobs, vigilantes, and “law enforcement” from the time of slavery to, quite possibly, this morning. The fundamental reason for the killing of African-Americans by whites has been fear by many whites of all classes that the existing rules of racial hierarchy, that is, white supremacy, are endangered--whether by slave uprisings, Blacks threatening white job monopolies, taking political power from whites,A lynch mob.moving into white neighborhoods,...

Bernie Sanders’ campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination has taken off like a rocket, with huge rallies and an outpouring of enthusiasm for his condemnation of corporate greed, inequality, and rampant social injustice in the United States. Bernie openly says he’s a socialist, and much of his program is flatly unacceptable to the ruling capitalist “one percent” and the Democratic Party leadership. What he’s saying about what’s wrong with our system is catching fire,...

While socialists debate how to relate to the many thousands of progressives attracted to Bernie Sanders' campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, the most viable independent left alternative for 2016 needs support from socialists now. The Green Party and its leading presidential candidate, Jill Stein, are best positioned to secure state ballot lines across the country to provide a credible alternative to the candidates of the two major capitalist parties in 2016. What is needed now...

The frequency with which the police kill young Black men makes a couple of weeks seem like the distant past, and underscores the steep hill that the pushback against police violence and repression has to climb. For four days bridging the second weekend in August, Ferguson and the rest of the St. Louis metro area were the focus of that fightback. A coalition of 40 groups organized a series of events to remember Michael Brown and 1,000 other people killed by police in the United States in the past...

By the time I’d registered as a driver's license-holding North Carolinian, the NC NAACP, along with likeminded civil rights groups, had made a Monday habit of storming their state capitol to demonstrate in plain view of their lawmakers. Beginning in April 2013 and enduring week after week, during rain, shine, and 100-plus-percent humidity,A Moral Monday protest.thousands of people, led by the Moses-esque Barber, were descending upon Raleigh to protest the onslaught of their...

Solidarity understands the strategic imperative of organizing a mass base for independent working class political action that unites working people, the independent social movements, and organizations of the oppressed in a battle for their common interests against capitalism and its political representatives. Unlike those on the left who continue to see the Democratic Party as a lesser evil that can be influenced from within, we regard the Democratic Party as unreformable, committed to imposing...

Just like the neoliberalization of LGBT rights, there is a specific history of how the LGBT movement was globalized. In her address to United Nations in December 2011 on the anniversary of Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Hillary Clinton came out in support of the “global LGBT community” in a speech that declared gay rights as human rights. The then Secretary of State declared it a "violation of human rights" to commit violence or discrimination against people because of their sexual...

Against the Current: Although Black women have been central to the organizing of Black Lives Matter, it seems that the media focus on Black men and forgets the victimization that is imposed on Black women. How do you deal with this?Alice Ragland: Ignoring the Black women who have been victimized is unacceptable. This is one of the many problems that make me feel as if I constantly have to choose between my race and my gender.I deal with this by being vocal about the importance of including...

As if to show the world that the state of Louisiana is a human rights dead zone, the release of Albert Woodfox after 43 years in solitary confinement--what the prison system calls “cell restriction”--was delayed while the state attorney general appeals a federal judge’s order. His release was ordered by judge James Brady, who ruled that Woodfox cannot be tried a third time in the 1972 fatal stabbing of a prison guard at the infamous Angola state prison.Albert Woodfox.Two previous...

This article is based on a talk given by the author at the recent Future of Left/Independent Politics Electoral Action conference in Chicago, May 2-4, 2015.Those of us who want to see progressive social change in America view electoral activity not as end by itself, but as an important tool. Electoral activities serve three purposes:Mike Parker with posters from Richmond Progressive Alliance.Effecting change through the government or state. While we understand that government is not truly...

On Tuesday, May 12th, Dane County District AttorneyIsmael Ozanne announced that the state would not prosecute Matt Kenny,the white Madison police officer who shot and killed 19-year old TonyRobinson on March 6th. Speaking at a packed press conference, theprosecutor stated that Kenny had executed “the lawful use of deadly force”and would not face criminal charges for firing seven close-range roundsinto the unarmed African-American youth. Narrating the chain of events that led to what...

As evidence for its validity or usefulness faded, “progressive” institutions, organizations, and ideologues have clung tenaciously to their one great dogma, rooted in the faith that the two-party system remains an eternal, ultimately unchallengeable reality. As with the most reactionary commentators, self-described “progressives“ projected their own failures on those who declined to make them. This dogma asserts that it is more damaging to progressive interest to challenge the two-party...

Some 200 political activists from a variety of independent political organizations, as well as individual activists, carried out rich discussion and amicable debate about how to collaborate in the work of building a large political alternative to the left of the Democratic Party. Participating in the Future of the Left/Independent Politics Conference in an unprecedented spirit of cooperation, national, state, and local candidates and activists, as well as elected officials from the Green Party,...

Sixteen days after the arrest of Freddie Gray, Baltimore police and government officials have no word for their city on why he died. No statement, no explanation, no insight as to how this young man emerged from police custody with his voice box crushed and 80% of his spinal cord severed. Outrage at this injustice and the pattern of racist violence it represents has sparked ongoing demonstrations, a drive to organize and unite against police brutality, and a politicization unprecedented in the...

From state meltdowns in Libya and Yemen to the overwhelming nightmares in Syria and Iraq, the spreading chaos in the Middle East today presents the most extreme examples of a core reality: imperial overreach creates problems for which it has no solutions, and the horrific human costs are paid by people who bear no responsibility for creating the mess. We’ll briefly look here at some of the key situations in the Middle East, pointing to how a relentless U.S. drive for “stability” produces...

Eduardo Galeano, the world-renowned leftist Uruguayan journalist and writer made famous with the publication in 1971 of his book The Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, died today at the age of 74 in Montevideo, Uruguay, where he lived. Long admired as a journalist, with his three-volume Memory of Fire in 1982, Galeano also became known as a writer of non-fiction prose who might be compared to writers of fiction such as Gabriel García Márquez, author of...

The Committee will audit the Greek debt in the coming months, aimed at finding out whether part of the Greek public debt is illegitimate, illegal, odious or unsustainable. Without claiming to be exhaustive, one can propose the following definitions:Illegitimate public debt: debt that was contracted by a government without considering the public interest, a debt contracted in favour of a privileged minority.Illegal debt: debt contracted in violation of the current legal or constitutional...

Ta-Nehisi Coates of The Atlantic may have said it best when he said Ferguson was run by a gang, but Ferguson certainly is not unique. A Justice Department report painted a vivid picture of the police and courts shaking down low-income, Black residents of Ferguson in order to pad their own pockets and support the agenda of a white power structure. Since then, news reports across TV, newspapers and radio have shown that the practice of targeting poor people for selective ticketing, fines, and fees...

In the United States, as elsewhere, a woman’s body is not her own. College campuses are a hunting ground for sexual predators, as women come forward to disclose various forms of date rape. According to police records, almost one-third of female homicide victims are killed by their partners. Each year an estimated 1.3 million women suffer domestic abuse; one of every four women will experience domestic violence during her lifetime. Witnessing violence between parents (or other caregivers) is...

Since September 26, 2014 the demand has been the same: “They were taken away alive! We want them back alive!” We denounce the clear participation and responsibility of the state at all levels and in particular the involvement of the 27th Infantry Battalion of the Mexican Army in the disappearance of our comrades.The government of Peña Nieto has not only given no response to the demand of the social movement in Mexico, but has also attempted to hide the deep social crisis the country is...

The early 1950s witnessed an extraordinary sweep of popular mobilisations across the African continent inspired by aspirations for emancipatory freedom: an end to the colonial yoke. Nationalist parties convinced people that the path to freedom was through political independence. Since then, many of the gains of independence, which cost the blood and lives of millions in Africa, have been reversed with the privatisation of the commons and public utilities, as well as by dispossessions of land, by...

Malcolm X was a unique person. His transition from Malcolm Little to the internationally renowned Malcolm X--with the development in his final years of uncompromising opposition to all forms of national/international oppression, exploitation, and discrimination--is truly exceptional.Malcolm X.Malcolm was never a criminal. Instead I see the anti-social behavior of his early life as being the result of his victimization by the most criminal, inhumane, hypocritical, ruling class and society that...

Activists and candidates from around the country will come together on May 2-3 in Chicago to share their experiences and to launch a network for future cooperation at the Future of Left/Independent Electoral Action Conference.Left to right: Brian Jones, Kshama Sawant, and Howie Hawkins. Sawant and Hawkins have endorsed the conference.The past few years have seen a significant uptick in independent political initiatives on the left, from election campaigns to new local electoral and social...

So the battle lines seem to be drawn. Is that simply posturing in order to raise the stakes, or is any dialogue really impossible?Alexis Tsipras of Syriza and Pablo Iglesias of Podemos.I tend to lean towards the latter. Syriza proposes two fundamental things: First, maintain budgetary balance—something few European governments can boast of doing—but redistribute the costs differently, lightening the burden on victims of the crisis while increasing it for those who have benefited from it....

The Black Lives Matter Movement is alive and well. If it has for the moment—under political attack and facing the winter’s sub-freezing temperatures—withdrawn from the streets, it has done so to plan a new stage in the fight for justice for African American victims of police racism and violence. As many as 400 people, mostly young people of color, attended the eight-hour long Black Lives Matter Gathering at the famous Riverside Church in Manhattan on January 30 where in...

Since the attack against Charlie Hebdo, France has been the scene of a veritable outpouring of Islamophobia: accusations of culpability, amalgams, violence. But the least that can be said is that the ground had been largely prepared. We could almost have forgotten, in fact, that on the morning of January 7, a few hours before the attack against Charlie Hebdo, the "special guest" on the morning programme of France Inter was Michel Houellebecq, author of a "novel of anticipation" in which a Muslim...

From a political point of view the Greek bourgeoisie and its political representatives are stunned and voiceless. All their hopes of heading off Syriza rely on Europe’s leaders--and ruling classes. For their part, the line seems clear enough: it is the politics of the ‘iron cage’, seeking to shut down a Syriza government as quickly as possible. The spearhead of this effort is the attempt to force Syriza to request an extension of the current ‘assistance programme’, which runs out on 28...

After the passage of so many restrictions on abortion procedures and increasing attacks on contraceptive information, the right seems to feel wind in its sails and various spokespeople—including the former Lieut. Governor of Texas, David Dewhurst, an oil and gas businessman—have called for the overturning of Roe v. Wade. The House of Representatives plans to vote on the 20-week abortion ban on the 2015 anniversary of Roe v. Wade. This ban is similar to one passed in Arizona that a federal...

There were many small and large victories. This was the beginning of desegregation. There were civil rights bills, a tremendous expansion of the African-American middle class, the massive entry of women into the labor force, and the end of the war in Vietnam. Radical Black youth begin to talk to one another across borders of race and class. But over the 50 years since we've seen that the struggle for justice has many layers, some that we addressed in the 1960s and some that we did not.We...

Against the Current: Mass incarceration has suddenly gotten quite a lot of attention in the media and in the political mainstream. Why has it become a high profile issue all of a sudden?James Kilgore: Lots of things have happened. The first, and most important, is that people in the critically impacted communities have started to fight back. We’ve had a lot of mobilization around the War on Drugs, some of it sparked by the wonderful book by Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow. She has helped...

The resumption of diplomatic relations between the USA and Cuba as well as the release of three Cubans sentenced to life imprisonment in the USA for espionage constitutes a victory for the Cuban people. For more than 50 years and under a dozen presidents, the US administration has tried everything to destroy the Cuban revolution. Military intervention in 1961 at the Bay of Pigs, conspiracies to assassinate Cuban leaders, an economic embargo to strangle the life of the island, pressures of all...

Two current high-profile stories--police killings of Black people and the secret torture prisons run by the U.S. military and CIA in the “war on terror”-- might seem separate and distinct. In truth, the path between them is short. A system that tortures prisoners abroad will murder people at home, and the targeted populations are not randomly chosen. There are several common elements:1. Dehumanization. In order to subject someone to waterboarding, sleep deprivation, freezing, or stretching...

I created #BlackLivesMatter with Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi, two of my sisters, as a call to action for Black people after 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was post-humously placed on trial for his own murder and the killer, George Zimmerman, was not held accountable for the crime he committed. It was a response to the anti-Black racism that permeates our society and also, unfortunately, our movements.Black Lives Matter is an ideological and political intervention in a world where Black lives...

Responding to Mayor de Blasio’s obvious point, the New York City police “union” head said the mayor had thrown all cops under the bus by implying that police practices are racially based. Mayor de Blasio, a white man with a Black son, expressed a bitter truth that most white people deny: race and racism underpin police practice and U.S. society.Significantly, the “Black Lives Matter” campaign is being joined by a growing number of whites. Most whites still believe, however, that race...

I think the issue is not so much the number of police per se, although that is a factor, but what is their role. What are our expectations about the role of the police in managing crime and disorder problems, which can be real problems that need to be managed? But what we've had is a deeply conservative theory that becomes the kind of hegemonic way to think about crime and disorder, and that's the Broken Windows theory.It is a product of neoconservative intellectuals in the early 1980s trying...

Finally, even if at least three decades too late, America’s politicians are beginning to take notice of the fact that we have become the country on the planet locking up more people than any other.It would be nice to think that these elected officials are now discussing our historically unprecedented rates of incarceration because there has been some sort of moral awakening, some new degree of discomfort if not outright dismay that the United States now has more than seven million people,...

According to the latest predictions of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), if the Ebola pandemic continues to progress at the current rhythm, it could affect 1.4 million people in Liberia and Sierra Leone between now and January 2015, leading to the deaths of 700,000 in a year, and thus making Ebola the third leading cause of death from infectious diseases in Africa, after AIDS and respiratory diseases. The two countries most seriously affected could suffer the loss of 10...

It has been two years since the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) struck for the first time in over 20 years and changed the discourse on education in the United States. The strike was historic in making issues of race and class central to a contract struggle and in garnering public support to defend public education.The CTU strike confronted the attack on public education championed nationally by Arne Duncan, Obama’s Secretary of Education, and the national forces in favor of privatization, from...

On Sunday, October 12, Bolivians voted to re-elect Evo Morales Ayma, Bolivia’s incumbent president, with an overwhelming 60% of the vote. Morales has indeed gained widespread popular support through his anti-imperialist and socialist policies, with even the World Bank forced to recognise the successes of his social programmes. His government has fallen short, however, of the revolutionary promises it was first elected on. That is why it is important to ask: how far do Morales’ reforms truly...

The weekend's events began with a protest in Clayton, MO, outside the offices of county prosecutor Robert McCulloch. Clayton is the county seat for St. Louis County, where Michael Brown was killed. It is a government and financial hub characterized by the type of highrise office buildings we in the Midwest associate with downtowns.Over 500 people assembled in the rain to demand an indictment against the cop who killed Michael Brown. Police and civic leaders throughout the St. Louis area were...

Our campaign plan extends past the election. The post-election focus will be on building the Green Party as a mass party in New York for all progressives and socialists who agree on the need for united political action independent of the two-party system of corporate rule.Our campaign organization is built around local campaign committees open to all supporters, who range from members of socialist organizations to disgruntled Democrats and Working Families Party members to unaffiliated...

Darren Wilson.Darren Wilson, the killer of unarmed African American teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri on August 9, continues to receive full pay and freedom. At the Ferguson police department many cops are wearing “I am Darren Wilson” bracelets to mock the chants of Black men and women who chant “I am Michael Brown” at city council meetings and on the street.Cops and prosecutors assume that Wilson used “reasonable force” and only faces scrutiny because of the public...

We are in a movement moment.What began as a local call for Justice for Mike Brown has grown into a nationwide shout for justice. Mike Brown falls in a long line of others killed as a result of systemic racial bias and violence against black and brown communities. John Crawford, III, Ezel Ford, Eric Garner, Oscar Grant, Amadou Diallo, Marilyn Banks and countless others named and unnamed have been killed through the excessive use of force by law enforcement.As droves of people, many of them...

Imperialism creates crises that it cannot solve. That’s the ultimate takeaway from president Obama’s September 10 speech – and the entire series of cascading catastrophes from Syria and Iraq to Afghanistan and beyond. As the United States slip-slides into its next Middle East war, are there any reasons to expect this time will turn out differently?Leaving aside the boilerplate twaddle about U.S. “leadership” in combating every global crisis from terrorism to Ebola...

Two Americas. Two realities. Race matters. Us against them.The mass media have swarmed all over Ferguson, Missouri for one reason: The Black community went into the streets after the police murder of Michael Brown, and refused orders to leave. They have inspired solidarity actions taking place all over the United States and internationally, including Latino, Asian and white young people along with African Americans.“Hands Up, Don't Shoot” spread across the country. It reflects...

Cease-fires--brief interruptions in Israel’s destruction of Gaza--come and go, for one simple reason: Israel will not lift the blockade, the siege, the strangulation of Gaza, and the United States will not force it to do so. Officially, the line is that the blockade won’t end “until the rockets stop and Hamas is disarmed.” The reality is that if Hamas were disarmed and the rockets stopped the blockade would continue anyway, and the people of Gaza know it, because the real...

It’s official now, as if it weren’t obvious the whole time: Israel is hitting what it aims at, including housing blocks with dozens of trapped families inside, hospitals, schools, mosques, and even places where its air-drop leaflets had told Gaza residents to shelter. These places are hit, says prime minister Netanyahu, because that’s where Hamas hides its rockets to fire into Israel.Even if that’s true--which, in part at least, it probably is--it simply puts Israel and Hamas on the...

There should never have been any doubt that another Israeli assault on Gaza would occur, with the inevitable accompanying mass atrocities. That’s not necessarily because it serves anyone’s strategic interests--but simply because Israel’s brutalities in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, the strangulation of Gaza by Israel, the new military-dominated regime in Egypt, and the latest collapse of the absurd “peace process” exercise would inevitably produce a triggering event one way or...

Just two weeks after the August 28, 1963 March on Washington, four girls aged 11-14 — Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson and Denise McNair — died in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama.Medgar Evers.The year 1963 was marked by assassinations and at least 35 bombings. Among those murdered were William Moore, a white civil rights activist who was assassinated on April 20, and Medgar Evers, a NAACP leader in Mississippi, who was...

“WE HAVE TO liberate ourselves from the idea that we caused this,” says Tony Blair, former British Prime Minister, referring to the present disaster in Iraq. The first question this raises is why anyone would ask for Tony Blair’s opinion on anything. George W. Bush, at least, seems smart enough to hide out in a bramble patch on his ranch and say nothing.Of course, the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 with Britain’s support “caused this” – by creating the al-Qaeda outfit now called...

Note: Solidarity has also signed on to this statement from the Not1More campaign, and we encourage you to have your organizations do the same.Earlier this week, a number of organizations claiming to support immigration reform—including SEIU (Service Employees International Union), National Immigration Forum, United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, Sojourners, and the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights—signed a letter to...

The National Committee of Solidarity has endorsed the statement below from An Attack On Us All:On May 2, 2014, in the Zapatista territory of La Realidad, Chiapas, Mexico, the group CIOAC-Histórica [with the participation of the Green Ecological Party and the National Action Party (PAN)], planned and executed a paramilitary attack on unarmed Zapatista civilians. An autonomous Zapatista school and clinic was destroyed, 15 people were ambushed and injured and Jose Luis Solis Lopez (Galeano),...

On April 5, undocumented organizers and allies gathered for actions in more than 70 cities calling for an end to deportations. The date was chosen because it’s the estimated date for when the Obama administration will deport its two millionth person. Obama has officially overseen more deportations than any other President in U.S. history, with almost three years left in his second term, earning him the title “Deporter in Chief.”April 5 action in Columbus, OH.If deportations continue at...

This article appears in the March/April 2014 issue of Against the Current.Three Years Ago, Tamesha Means was rushed to Mercy Health Partners Hospital in Muskegon, Michigan after her water broke 18 weeks into her pregnancy. The hospital diagnosed a premature rupture of membranes but sent her home, saying there was nothing to be done at that stage.Tamesha Means.The next day she returned with painful contractions, bleeding and elevated temperature. She was given two Tylenols and, after her...

This article is an edited version from “Twenty-first Century Socialist Feminism,” Socialist Studies, (Spring 2014). It appears in the March/April 2014 issue of Against the Current.Pakistani women celebrate International Women's Day.In the 21st century, women of the working classes — employed in the formal economy, the informal economy, working in the countryside or doing unwaged labor — have entered the global political stage in an astonishing array of movements. Sparked by the...

Freedom Fighter Chokwe Lumumba died suddenly on February 25, 2014 at the age of 66. We extend our deepest condolences to his family, the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, and the New Afrikan People’s Organization.

Solidarity supports Dr. Anthony Monteiro, and urges others to do the same. The text below is republished from a petition statement by Educators for Mumia Abu-Jamal (EMAJ). To see the list of signers and information about how to sign the petition, please visit the EMAJ website. Also see this article for more background information.We unite with Philadelphia faculty members, labor, community and student organizations to call for the immediate reinstatement of Professor Anthony Monteiro as...

In his State of the Union address, President Obama highlighted growing inequality in the U.S. He also pledged to take steps to reduce greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. What has the Obama administration done recently on both counts?First, it has agreed to a new budget with the Republicans that didn’t renew benefits for the long-term unemployed. This will immediately impoverish 1.3 million workers. Every day a new batch of the unemployed becomes part of the long-term unemployed.

Tributes are pouring in to honor the memory and legacy of Pete Seeger. Among so many other contributions to the movements for social justice, he was a supporter of the struggle for rank and file union power. Ken Paff, national organizer of Teamsters for a Democratic Union, recalls his support of TDU with a Detroit benefit concert in April, 1985.Seeger is famous, of course, for making “We Shall Overcome” a civil and human rights anthem. The story of where he found that song is told below by...

On the occasion of the Martin Luther King holiday, we present this exploration of the unfinished economic and social justice agenda of the Civil Rights Movement. It was written as a review of a new book by Paul LeBlanc and Michael D. Yates, A Freedom Budget for All Americans, and appears in the January-February 2014 issue of Against the Current.The Freedom Budget for All Americans was issued at a broadly endorsed conference in 1966. It was initiated by civil rights leaders A. Philip Randolph...

A politically weakened U.S. president is pulled by a powerful domestic lobby and influential foreign governments toward launching a war that U.S. imperialism right now doesn’t want, that the world doesn’t want, and that the large majority of the American public doesn’t want — what will be the outcome?Top officials and negotiators announce a deal between the U.S., Iran, and European allies.It’s an interesting, if dangerous and scary, test of how U.S. politics...

Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.Amandla! does not believe in miracles. Mandela is not immortal. He has lived the fullest of lives. Amandla! stands with his family, the ANC (the organisation he lived and died for), his closest comrades, especially the surviving Treason Trialists and Robben Island prisoners, the South African people as well as millions of people around the world to mark the passing of a great man.Yet Mandela was no God, no...

The members of AF3IRM, each of whom remains connected to an ancestral homeland often visited by crises and calamities, share the distress of the people of the Philippines; we stand in solidarity with them; we send their sympathy for this unparalleled tragedy for the archipelago.We urge all those who have compassion in their hearts and spirits, who wish to honor the steadfastness with which men, women and children clung to one another in the teeth of the strongest recorded storm of human history...

The piece below was submitted to us by a member of the New York City branch of Solidarity, originally developed as a short presentation on the realities of police brutality and the character of organized opposition in the city.I want to explore a political question I've found more and more important to have an answer to: the role of current police repression in the US. Maybe I should say this differently, since I think we'd all agree capitalists will use various state apparatus to accomplish...

[The following article will appear in the November-December issue of Against the Current.]MALCOLM X BY 1964 had broken with the Nation of Islam, a religious-centered Black Nationalist group. He remained an orthodox Muslim and Black Nationalist, but advocated a broader strategy to win Black freedom by supporting wider unity of all oppressed ethnic groups. He also, in a shift, supported united front efforts with progressive whites.Yet his “Ballot or Bullet” speech, where many of these ideas...

It took some serious ruling class intervention to finally present John Boehner with an instruction he couldn’t refuse: get the Reid-McConnell Senate deal to the House floor for a straight vote to reopen the government and raise the debt ceiling. You can tell the Tea Party that you know where they’re coming from, and they need to crawl back under it – and if you’re soon-to-be SPINO (“Speaker in Name Only”), that’s tomorrow’s problem. We run this damn country, and we don’t care...

For the first time in many years, there are not one, but two exciting new campaigns that have great potential to put unions back on the map of public consciousness. The efforts to organize workers at Walmart as well as workers at fast food restaurants and other big box stores in cities across the US have caught the attention of millions of people who previously had little to no connection to organized labor.In this article, I offer some thoughts on what makes these campaigns so exciting,...

UPDATE: The Shutdown ShowdownUpdated October 1, 2013Yes, they did it: over the edge and down the ravine, into the “partial government shutdown.“ If you need help from your local Social Security or Veterans Administration office, forget it. Calling Fannie Mae for a loan modification? Don’t bother – those notoriously cynical bureaucrats aren’t even there. Camping in a national park? Pack up and get out. Even if you want to stage an antiwar protest at your downtown Federal Building, you...

McCain, Boehner, Graham, Kerry, Biden...the call of U.S. war hawks from both parties is growing louder. Their pretext, of course, is the chemical attack that killed hundreds of civilians near Damascus, adding to tens of thousands killed, and millions of refugees displaced, all manifestations of the cruelties of the Syrian civil war.According to a senior administration official, President Obama has made "no decision" on military intervention (Reuters), but warplanes and military transporters are...

[The following statement was originally issued in Arabic by the Egyptian Revolutonary Socialists on 14 August 2013. It was subsequently published in English on Socialist Worker.]Down with Military Rule! Down with al-Sisi, the Leader of the Counter-Revolution!The bloody dissolution of the sit-ins in Al-Nahda Square and Raba'a al-Adawiyya is nothing but a massacre—prepared in advance. It aims to liquidate the Muslim Brotherhood. But, it is also part of a plan to liquidate the Egyptian...

Over the last week, President Obama has kicked off a series of speeches on the subject of the economy. The deeper purpose of his speaking tour is to stake out his position for the upcoming budget and deficit cutting battle that will likely occur within the next few months, as both the new budget year begins on October 1 and a new "debt ceiling" extension deadline concurrently approaches.

By a narrow majority, 5-4, the US Supreme Court overturned the crucial enforcement provisions of historic 1965 Voting Rights Act. The ruling issued on June 25 is a major defeat for not only voting rights but civil rights.Some have argued that it is not as bad as civil rights leaders proclaim -- only a setback. But only those unfamiliar with grim realities of US history could make such an argument. What’s been won in the past has several times been reversed or so eroded it lost its...

Medgar Evers was assassinated on June 12, 1963 by white supremacist Byron De La Beckwith, who was convicted of the crime three decades later in 1994. This 50th anniversary tribute was written by Evers’ friend and fellow organizer John R. Salter, Jr. for Against the Current, where it will appear in the forthcoming issue #165.We are also posting this on a week that is now noteworthy for another event in Jackson, Mississippi, the May 21 primary victory of Chokwe Lumumba for Mayor. Lumumba, a...

ON APRIL 10, PRESIDENT Obama released his formal budget for Fiscal 2014 beginning this October. Liberals should not act shocked and surprised: Obama’s repeated offers to cutSocial Security cost-of-living adjustments, and other yet undefined Medicare measures, are a continuation of his practice and approach for the past two years.

[This article was written by Paul Prescod for the Solidarity Political Committee. For information on the April 20 Ecosocialist Conference in New York City, please see their "call to conference" here. A statement by Solidarity’s Ecosocialism Working Group on the Superstorm Sandy disaster is online at the Webzine, as well as an announcement by Nick Davenport of the “Ecosocialist Contingent” here.]EARTH DAY BEGAN on April 22, 1970 as an environmental teach-in modeled after those on the...

Is it the stupidity of dysfunctional bureaucrats? The tactical blundering of a likeable president facing an irreconcilable congressional divide? Or is this the cleverest maneuver yet from the self-proclaimed defenders of democracy and the American quality of life? My vote is for clever.For the moment we are talking about the Sequestration crisis, just the latest of what president Obama himself called many manufactured crises in his inauguration speech. Though it may seem like he is distressed...

WE KNOW ABOUT heroes of social justice and liberation who come “organically“ from the movements: Nelson Mandela. Rosa Parks, Ella Baker and Martin Luther King, Jr. Eugene V. Debs. Chico Mendes. Bernadette Devlin McAliskey. Heroes of grassroots resistance in Palestine, in the Philippines, in Central America and so many other struggles, those with names we know and so many more we don’t.Then there are those heroic individuals who seem to come out of nowhere, perhaps influenced in some ways...

The Forward on Climate demonstration in Washington, DC on Sunday, February 17th will be a landmark event in the history of the US environmental movement and a major step forward for the struggle. Radicals and revolutionaries, including Solidarity along with other socialist organizations, are organizing an Ecosocialist Contingent at the demonstration. (Details of the contingent are at the end of this article.)Despite great advances in changing popular consciousness on the gravity of the...

This editorial statement appears in the January-February issue of AGAINST THE CURRENT. It went to press before the full horror of the fire and heat crisis in Australia – with recorded temperatures of up to 129 degrees Fahrenheit! – had unfolded. We hope very soon to have reports on the Australian situation. We also draw readers’ attention to the Webzine report on the Idle No More mobilizations in the Canadian state, which includes a critically important focus on environmental degradation...

The following article was written prior to the resolution of the so-called "fiscal cliff:" a term used to describe the across the board tax increases and would have forced spending cuts on midnight of the new year. The House of Representatives passed a Senate bill on January 1st, 2013 which temporarily avoids this event with President Obama signing it soon afterwards. Rasmus outlines the fight and probable future sell-outs.LATE FRIDAY AFTERNOON, December 28, President Obama held a press...

THE UNITED STATES government, following an old and well-rehearsed script, declared its full support of “Israel’s right to defend itself.” This is a rather technical term, which requires translation into ordinary English: It means “Israel’s right to routinely squeeze and starve the population of Gaza and assassinate their leaders until they attempt to fight back, at which point Israel is fully entitled to massacre them from air, sea and land.”Other specialized language needs...

WHAT WAS THE 2012 election about – and what did it ultimately show? Many fundamental issues were never even raised – climate change and environmental catastrophe, poverty and inequality, to name a few. On issues that were debated, like the economy and the deficit and the endless and endless chatter about “middle class jobs,” the presidential candidates largely avoided presenting their real positions. On the right of the United States to rule the world, their positions were almost...

The superstorm was a catastrophe waiting to happen in the era of global warming. Rather than an ordinary late-season hurricane, Sandy became a monster fuelled by the heated waters of the Atlantic. It smashed through the Caribbean, causing massive damage and dozens of deaths both in Cuba (which is generally well-prepared for such disasters) and Haiti (which isn’t). But destruction in the global South is all too quickly forgotten, and would have been in this case if not for what happened next....

The U.S. presidential, congressional and state elections have been dominated by the two major political parties, Republicans and Democrats, and by the financial, corporate, and wealthy interests who fundamentally control them. Since the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision of 2010 this year’s election campaigns are more than ever financed by Wall Street, produced by Madison Avenue, disseminated by the corporate media and increasingly by the internet’s social media as well. While...

By Rob BartlettAugust 10, 2012Updated for ATC 160. The Chicago Teachers Union, taking on “Mayor 1% Rahm Emanuel, is preparing its members and the community for a possible fall strike in defense of quality public education. Download the PDF of this story here.WHETHER OR NOT the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) will strike this September is an open question. But the issues they raise are gaining national attention. Although the CTU has not been out on strike since 1987, 23,780 out of 26,502 union...

A Solidarity Pamphletby Marc Aaron, Warren Davis, Dianne Feeley,David Finkel & Kit WainerDownload the PDF here.AT THIS MOMENT, the central issue facing our society is how to respond to the deepest crisis of global capitalism since the 1930s. Unfortunately, we won’t be hearing a substantive debate about this in the 2012 elections. The Democratic and Republican parties both favor austerity — in short, making working-class people pay to bail out the corporations and get capitalism back on...

MAY DAY 2012 is part of an ongoing process of “the 99%” reclaiming the heritage of this International Workers’ Day. On May 1, 2006 and again in 2007, immigrant communities and allies boldly took to the streets against government and police harassment. Now, the Occupy movement is seizing the opportunity of May 1 as a next step to reclaiming the legacy of this day. In the past year we have witnessed the emergence of nationwide mass movement of a kind not seen in the United States for many...

It has been several weeks since Obama announced that the G8 will be meeting at the militarized Camp David, rather than in Chicago. Activists are still ambiguous about the move, even as we publicly declare victory. On one hand, the withdrawal of G8 demonstrates the power of the protestors, and Chicago-area organizers in particular, to kick out this monstrous budget-draining summit. In addition, Mayor Emmanuel ends up looking like a fool, which benefits anyone fighting austerity in Chicago....

AFTER LOSING A war, one of the worst things that can happen to a society is for its people to be told it was a “victory.” The inability or failure to learn the lessons of the United States’ defeat in Iraq enables the plunge into the next disastrous adventure: Can you say “Iran”?Veterans mobilize at Occupy Wall Street last FallIs a U.S. and/or Israeli direct military attack on Iran really as imminent as recent reports might indicate? We think probably not, but the...

AS 2011 CLOSED, the mainstream press was awash with ominous, dark assessments of the state of the relationship between the United States and Pakistan. After a cross-border NATO air strike in November resulted in the deaths of 24 Pakistani soldiers, Pakistan responded forcefully, closing the Af-Pak border to NATO traffic, expelling the U.S. military from an air base inside Pakistan,(1) and boycotting the International Conference on Afghanistan in Bonn, which had been tasked with outlining the...

THE QUESTION ISN’T whether the magnificent “Occupy” movement will continue after police action and the onset of winter have largely emptied the encampments. The righteous rage that made the movement possible, and the enormous social and economic crisis that made it necessary, are not going away anytime soon. Quite the contrary — capitalism’s inherent contradictions, made worse by economic policies in Europe and the United States that seem calculated to maximize the...

IT TOOK ABOUT twenty minutes after the last official U.S. combat troops crossed the border from Iraq into Kuwait for the Potemkin village of “Iraqi stability and democracy” carefully constructed by the American occupation to fall apart. The regime of prime minister Nouri al-Maliki has brought a terrorism indictment against the vice-president Tariq al-Hashimi, who promptly headed north to autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan where the central government’s hand doesn’t reach. Purges of university...

And some of the Pharisees among the multitude said unto him, Master, rebuke thy disciples. And he answered and said unto them, I tell you that, if these should hold their peace, the stones would immediately cry out.—Luke 19:39-40Tahrir Square in Cairo, EgyptWhere does the tremendous power of the occupation of city spaces, particularly the square, come from? The occupation of Tahrir Square in Cairo brought down the Mubarak dictatorship, theindignados in assembly in the plazas shook the...

Occupy Oakland is calling for no work and no school on November 2 as part of the general strike. We are asking that all workers go on strike, call in sick, take a vacation day or simply walk off the job with their co-workers. We are also asking that all students walk out of school and join workers and community members in downtown Oakland. All banks and large corporations must close down for the day or demonstrators will march on them…

Occupy Wall Street is just about the best thing that’s happened to America since the economic crisis first broke. Occupation is spreading. We’re standing up and fighting back. And we’re showing that another way of living together is possible.We’re a movement of the underdogs. We embrace the unemployed, the homeless, the ex-offenders, the down-and-out and the downtrodden. We welcome those who are discriminated against, those who are outcast. That’s what democracy is all about. And...

While I was cursing the inane mainstream commentary on the global economy recently, I was reminded of a pivotal scene in the 1976 movie, All the President’s Men. As two young reporters investigate the burglary of Democratic Party offices in the Watergate Hotel, a disgruntled, high-ranking FBI agent, code-named Deep Throat, advises, “Follow the money. Always follow the money.”They did. And, in the process, the real-life journalists, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, blew the lid off one of...

“This fight to end the death penalty is not won or lost through me but through our strength to move forward and save every innocent person in captivity around the globe. We need to dismantle this Unjust system city by city, state by state and country by country.” -Troy DavisThe hypocrisy of the United States was on full display late Wednesday night, "International Peace Day," as the Supreme Court ruled that Georgia should proceed with the execution of Troy Davis. His body was strapped to a...

BREAKING: The scheduled 7pm execution of Troy Davis has been temporarily delayed by the United States Supreme Court while they decide whether to rule on his case. The streaming video feed at Democracy Now! has constant updates live from the maximum security prison in Jackson, Georgia. Call the United States Supreme Court at (202) 479-3000 and urge them to rule in Troy's favor. There are reports of a spontaneous demonstration at the Supreme Court building in Washington, DC.On Tuesday Morning,...

by Isaac SteinerOn September 21, the state of Georgia intends to kill a 43-year old man named Troy Davis who has spent nearly half his life on death row. This is the fourth time Davis has faced the executioner's needle. A powerful international movement, fueled by the lack of evidence linking Davis to the 1989 murder he's accused of—and by simple opposition to the barbaric death penalty—has pushed back the state's previous attempts.Troy Davis with his mother in 2002Now that same movement...

by Ricardo Levins MoralesThe Madison worker uprising shook up the US political landscape. State governments that were peacefully going about their business forcing workers and communities to pay for upper class gluttony are facing resistance on a scale they had not imagined. Instead of letting their fellow workers be picked off and destroyed sector by sector, a wide swath of the working public rose in support of Wisconsin teachers and state workers. This, in turn, has given new juice to efforts...

IS THERE ANY ruling class in history that would sit by as its country went bankrupt, not by necessity but to serve the ideological agenda of a political fringe? It seems incredible, yet at face value it seems that this perspective is looming on August 2 – and not to just any country but to the world superpower, the United States of America.Legislation to raise the U.S. debt ceiling is usually a routine procedure whose necessity is well understood. The Republicans’ position is to hold this...

“U-S-A! U-S-A!” The celebrations – in gatherings in front of the White House, at Ground Zero and around the country as the news spread of the U.S. assassination of Osama bin Laden – are understandable, after a decade in which the mass murderer OBL was portrayed as the incarnation of all things evil. The popular euphoria will fade quickly. The triumphal comment by the President of the United States – “The U.S. has shown it can do whatever it wants to do”...

For socialists and for antiwar forces, the events in Libya have presented — and continue to present — agonizing political and ethical choices. It is entirely logical and inevitable that thoughtful activists find themselves in disagreement among each other, and indeed in internal conflict within themselves, over questions raised by the Libyan popular uprising and by the military intervention of the western powers. Recognizing the difficulties of the situation is the essential first...

by Stephanie LuceI spent the last few days in Madison, returning to the city where I lived for many years in the 90s. I hadn’t been back there in almost 10 years, and I wasn’t sure what to expect.The major event was the rally on Saturday, March 12. This started off with a tractor-cade around the Capitol Square at 10 am. Dozens of tractors came from around the state in protest of Governor Walker’s proposed cuts and attacks on democracy. The streets were lined all the way around the square...

By Santiago Alba Rico & Alma AllendeRebelion, March 3rd 2011We have the impression that a great worldwide liberation process may be aborted by the unappeasable ferocity of Gaddafi, U.S. interventionism, and a lack of foresight in Latin America.We might describe the situation like this: in a part of the world linked once again to strong internal solidarities and from which only lethargy or fanaticism was expected, a wave of popular uprisings have arisen which have threatened to topple the...

—David FinkelJanuary 27, 2011 -- The revolt spreading from Tunisia to Algeria, Egypt, Yemen and beyond inspires both hope and fear. Hope, because so many tens of millions of people are taking to the streets at the risk of beating, torture and death to liberate themselves and their country. But also fear, because of the chilling reality that for every democratic victory -- such as we’ve witnessed so far in Tunisia, or the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 or the political revolution that ended...

by David FinkelAFTER THE INITIAL horror, the responses to the massacre in Tucson have settled into the usual political dialogue-of-the deaf, and like most such discourse these days it is pretty much useless all around.

THE SOCIAL SECURITY “reform” proposal by Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, in advance of the December release of the “bipartisan” deficit reduction commission appointed by president Obama, is only the preview of a coming series of savage attacks on programs that working people in the United States have counted on for decades. These assaults in the name of “budget discipline” will dominate the legislative agenda for the next Congress, and for dozens of state legislatures as they face...

NOVEMBER 3, THE DAY AFTER -- Several points stand out from the long-predicted results of the midterm election. The Democrats, of course, took a big hammering -- and quite frankly, they deserved it. If it weren’t for the gift of a few whacked-out Tea Party candidates in critical races, they’d have lost the Senate too.A line of voters file into New York City polling station

By Dan La BotzSocialist Party candidate for the U.S. Senate from OhioDanLaBotz.comThe following essay represents a distillation of my basic stump speech over the past nine months of the campaign. Visit my YouTube page to watch me giving speeches very much like this one around Ohio - or follow my campaign on Facebook.

In recent weeks, millions of French workers and students have gone on strike and participated in massive demonstrations against proposed changes to the country's pension system. President Nicolas Sarkozy wishes to push through a change to that would raise the retirement age from 60 to 62. This attempt has become a social clash over which class will pay for the ongoing economic crisis: the rich elite, or the working majority.The union leadership, tied to the Socialist Party and its perspective...

by the Solidarity Political CommitteeUpdate: List of Protest Actions at FBI OfficesOn Friday, September 24, the FBI used search and seizure warrants to raid the homes of several antiwar and socialist activists in Minneapolis and Chicago. Subpoenas were delivered to activists in other states. The charges related to supposed "material aid to terrorist organizations." In this case, the activists appear to have been targetted because of their active support for organizations in Colombia and...

—by Isaac SteinerFrom Manhattan to Murfreesboro, Tennessee, the right wing’s efforts to demonize Muslim people has turned mosques and Islamic cultural centers into political battlegrounds. All progressive people have a responsibility to stand against the spread of this hatred, and we support all of the mobilizations that have been organized in defense of religious freedom and the Muslim community.The impact of this was made painfully clear on August 30th when a cabdriver, Ahmed Sharif, was...

ARIZONA’S VERSION OF ethnic cleansing, SB 1070, came into force on Thursday, July 29, minus those provisions halted by a federal court injunction – notably the requirement that police check the immigration status of anyone suspected of being “illegal.” The ruling by federal judge Susan Bolton is heading for appeals that will almost certainly wind up in U.S. Supreme Court. That body has recently distinguished itself by upholding the “personhood” rights of corporations, but not those...

President Obama and the Congressional Democrats have been stern in their condemnations of BP. Yet their responses to the greatest environmental catastrophe in U.S. history show the Democratic Party’s unwillingness to challenge not only the logic of private profitability, but also the short-term prerogatives of corporate interests.The President’s June 15 Oval Office address met a wide array of critics. Some questioned his lack of specificity, others the tardiness of his response. But Obama...

by the Socialist Project in CanadaThe massive police presence in Toronto over this week has been officially justified on the basis of protecting the leaders of the G8 and G20 countries meeting in Huntsville and Toronto. We were told that the creation of the fenced-in fortress, the massive mobilization of police (estimates ranging from 10-20,000) from across Canada, and even the passing of a secret law on policing (by the executive of the Ontario government without reference to the Legislative...

This week, Solidarity members will join thousands of other activists and organizers at the second United States Social Forum in Detroit, June 22-26. The USSF will combine educational and organizing workshops, protest, People's Movement Assemblies and cultural events, all focused on connecting and advancing the struggles of working and oppressed people, and against war and ecological destruction.The 2007 USSF in Atlanta succeeded in bringing together new networks dedicated to everything from...

The Israeli Navy’s murderous assault on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla has been described as a bungled and botched operation and a diplomatic disaster for Israel. It is all of that, but more important, it is a crime against the law of the sea in the context of a larger crime against humanity – the siege of Gaza.

Is this what people voted for? Bring all the troops home now!The voters in november 2008 spoke loud and clear: They rejected the disastrous wars of George W. Bush, the lies, the torture, the horrible waste of lives and resources. President Barack Obama, on his first day in office, promised that the Guantanamo prison would close within a year. “Gitmo” was created by the Bush-Cheney regime, on U.S.-occupied Cuban territory, to make sure the torture and military “trials” there would be...

— Jonah McAllister-EricksonActivist with the Thomas Merton Center (writing in a personal capacity)Afghanistan:The Case for Out NowRead the new statement by the Solidarity Political Committee on the case for immediate withdrawal from Afghanistan, issued on the day the occupation entered its ninth year.Check back in the upcoming days for reports on the October 17 mobilizations on the Solidarity Webzine. For more information about Solidarity's perspectives and work in the anti-war movement,...

Lawyers’ leadership on the road from resistance to reconciliationBy: Farooq TariqWe started our Long March from Lahore around 6pm on 12 June 2008. Four vehicles were carrying around 100 Labour Party Pakistan activists. The destination was Islamabad, where leaders of the lawyers’ movement announced a picket of parliament. This was to put pressure on the Pakistan Peoples Party government to fulfill their promise to restore the country’s top judges.

Statement by Cynthia McKinney, Power to the People Candidate for U.S. President, on the nomination of Barack Obama as the Democratic Party's Presidential Candidate in 2008(statement issued June 9, 2008)

Motion from Solidarity National Committee(Passed 5/17/08)Solidarity endorses the Cynthia McKinney campaign in the Green Party as the most viable option for an independent political alternative in the 2008 presidential election. We make this choice in the context of the following considerations:

by Marc JohnsonMedia reports have neglected the most important source of aid to victims of cyclone Nargis - spontaneous donations from their fellow citizens.With the Burmese regime continuing to deny the true extent of the catastrophe, and army factions vying to appropriate as much of the aid as possible, food, clothing and money gifts from private Burmese citizens probably represents over 80% of the aid actually received by victims of the cyclone, which killed over 30,000 people when it hit...

Nakba Day, 15 May, means "Day of the Catastrophe" and marks the beginning of the Palestinian exodus following Israel's creation in 1948. Solidarity salutes the brave struggle of the Palestinian people with these reflections:

Why We March On May Day(Op-Ed for L.A. Daily News)By: Nativo V. Lopez, National President, Mexican American Political Association (MAPA)The immigrant vote will increase to unstoppable heights in four short years across California's political landscape, a veritable big-foot electorate, according to a recently released study commissioned by the Grantmakers Concerned With Immigrants and Refugees. Fully one-third of California voters by 2012 will be comprised of immigrant voters - naturalized...

Watch it online here!Last month, March 13-16, hundreds of soldiers gathered in DC to disclose the realities of U.S. war policy in a public investigation called Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan. Veterans and civilian survivors of both conflicts gave public testimony and shared the eyewitness stories that have been censored from the American public about the true human cost of these occupations. The Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) are turning a page, and writing a new chapter in the...

Farooq Sulehria is a prominent radical journalist and leading member of the Labour Party Pakistan.Liaqat Bagh: On February 18, as the night set in, the lush green garden in Pakistan's northern town of Rawalpindi was witnessing a very different scene. Unlike the December 27 bloody Benazir tragedy staged on its gates, this scene featured a crowd of several thousand cheering and chanting. Waving Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) flags, chanting “Jeay Bhutto” (“Long live Bhutto”) youth embraced...

January 25, 2008About 3:00 am on Wednesday morning Jan. 23, well-coordinated explosions demolished the iron wall built by Israel to seal the southern border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt (the Philadelphi axis). Tens of thousands of Palestinians streamed across the border and entered the Egyptian side of the town of Rafah, which had been bisected by the wall, in search of food, gasoline, and other basic commodities which have been in short supply for many months in Gaza. The first wave of...

January 23, 2008Jeff HalperThe people of Palestine have done it again, taking their own fate in their hands after being let down by their own "moderate" political leadership and, indeed, the entire international community in their struggle for freedom. Early this morning they simply blew up the wall separating Gaza from Egypt, breaking a siege imposed on them by an Arab government in collaboration with Israel.

THE UNAUTHORIZED OPENING of Gaza’s border with Egypt may be known to later historians as the beginning of the Third Intifada of the Palestinian people. That remains to be seen. What should be clear to everyone -- with the Egyptian border now re-closing and with the Israeli assassinations of resistance leaders back in full operation – is that Gaza under closure and blockade is an open wound on the body of the “international community,” and the deliberate starvation of its people by the...

Boris KagarlitskyThe strike at the Ford factory in Vsevolozhsk, located right outside St. Petersburg, ended on Dec. 14. It was the longest and most intense standoff in post-Soviet times. The strike began on Nov. 20 and continued for three weeks. According to union activists, the plant's conveyors came to a full stop. Then management threw together one shift mainly composed of office workers and, toward the end of the strike, a second shift to keep the assembly line running. But the quality...

The following contributions reflect a partial cross-section of the rich and complex discussion taking place in the Venezuelan and international left just before and immediately after the narrow defeat of the Constitutional referendum. Undoubtedly the discussion will continue among all of us who view the social process in Venezuela as a beacon of hope in the resistance to savage neoliberalism and U.S. imperial domination.

Earlier this month, we featured coverage of events in Pakistan after President Musharaff declared martial law. As events have heated up again following the assassination of Pakistan People's Party leader Benazir Bhutto, be sure to look at our International Spotlight on Pakistan page. We also have a section on the Venezuelan referendum.The United Auto Workers (UAW) four-year contracts with General Motors, Chrysler and Ford contain cuts that mark the end of high-paying jobs in the U.S. auto...

On November 3, Pervez Musharraf, the president of Pakistan, declared a state of emergency and suspended the constitution in the face of protests against his attempted re-election while remaining army chief. Musharraf came to power following a 1999 military coup d'etat and since 2001 has been a key U.S. ally in the region. These recent actions lay bare the hypocrisy of the supposed democratic aims of the "War On Terror." Below, British socialist Tariq Ali reflects on the meaning of the state of...

Bush, Democrats and the War that Won’t End:OUT OF IRAQ – NOW!Download a copy of this statement in .pdf formatIn November 2006 the U.S. electorate repudiated the Bush regime’s war in Iraq and put the Democrats in control of Congress, with a clear mandate to bring this disastrous imperial adventure to an end. A year later it is clear that Congress under the Democratic leadership could – but won’t – end the war. It’s even becoming apparent that the leading Democratic presidential...

August 25, 2007, Newark, New Jerseyby César RosadoThe sweltering, above 95-degree heat did not deter the about 1,000-1,500 people that congregated today at Lincoln Park, in Newark, New Jersey, for the “People’s March for Peace, Equality, Jobs and Justice.” The march commemorated the 44th anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the 40th anniversary of the Newark Rebellion, and the second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.

Solidarity held a 3-day conference on "Socialism and Environmental Justice" in New York City, July 20-22. Joel Kovel, author of this article, and other socialist, labor and environmental justice activists presented on topics ranging from the Uneasy Alliance of Labor and Environmental Justice to Feminism, Reproduction and the Environment. Some of the resources gathered by the summer school committee, grouped under several themes and questions, are available at the bottom of the page.The optimism...

The second annual May Day mobilizations for immigrant rights brought an outpouring of 100,000 people into the streets of Chicago; tens of thousands in Los Angeles, where peaceful marchers with their families, as well as journalists, were met with a police riot at MacArthur Park; five thousand or more in Detroit; and thousands or tens of thousands in many other cities.

THE CRISIS IN the Middle East deepens as the Bush regime twists in the wind, offering non-solutions that even the establishment media openly question. The new Democratic majority in Congress has neither unity nor a coherent alternative. Republicans lost the November 2006 midterm election for one overwhelming reason-the U.S. population's repudiation of the war in Iraq and the leadership that produced this disaster. Now both pro-war parties share responsibility for continuing a war that the...

--from Solidarity’s Anti-War Working GroupWith the recent leak of the National Intelligence Estimate, the Bush administration’s own intelligence agencies have confirmed what the anti-war movement has been saying since 2003—the US invasion and occupation of Iraq have not promoted peace and democracy either in Iraq or around the world. Even on its own terms, the US war has been a failure-- providing a fertile environment for the growth of terrorism around the world. (Mark Mazzetti,Spy...

Artwork: Megan FinnAugust 29th marks the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina's destructive landfall in New Orleans. For five endless days the nation watched while 100,000 people, trapped by the floodwaters, struggled to survive. "They just left us here to die" remarked one woman in the Superdome. Her words captured the sentiment of many survivors -- that those too poor, too old, or too Black were just abandoned by the government.Rarely have the savage inequalities of race and class in...

How does ecosocialist politics differ from traditional socialist and labor politics? How do we ensure the generalized satisfaction of needs for all, including the equalization of living standards between the industrialized nations and the rest of the world, if humanity can no longer afford to keep expanding production based on energy from fossil fuels?

In 2014 Solidarity’s Ecosocialist Working Group began a project to discuss these and related questions. We publish three essays here as the beginning of a working paper exchanging ideas, proposals, and possible strategic frameworks. We also invite your comments.